Handy Shell - Review

Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week...

Handy Shell is scary, cute, not scary, powerful, easy to use and pointless all in the same breath. By the end of this review, you'll be able to choose the two words that apply for you (- if you want to pretend to skip to the end, I'd choose 'powerful' and 'easy to use').

Epocware think the regular S60 standby screen is missing functionality, so they've decided to replace it. And tweak the application launcher. And the task bar. Basically they want to give you a swiss army knife to replace the cutlass of the regular S60 experience. It's a mighty challenge, but they are more than up to it.

Now, on with the mighty review.



This used to be the bread and butter of third party application scenes in the past, but there again in the past the people with smartphones (or PDA's) were the tinkerers, hackers and programmers in the world. Those people are still there (albeit significantly outnumbered by regular users) and that means applications like Handy Shell are always going to be around as well.

And it's a good thing too, because Handy Shell ups the flexibility of your S60 smartphone by a significant factor. It's not for everyone, and there will be a lot of you arguing that the S60 interface doesn't need changing.

Split over three information screens, Handy Shell pulls S60 away from being a 'making calls and running applications' platform to 'making calls, organising your information, and running applications.'



First up, and the screen that's effectively the main screen of Handy Shell, and replaces the active stand-by, is the 'today' view, with four main strips of info - Clock, application shortcuts, phone settings and Calendar. The clock takes up most of the width of the screen, although by using a constant sized font (all characters are the same width) it makes it feel a little clunky, although it does hark back nicely to an old fashioned digital clock. It's a pity there are no formatting options for the clock.

It would be sensible to think that most people loading Handy Shell have done some customising on their own phone's desktop, so the inclusion of a standard set of six application short-cuts in the next strip is both welcome (after all, it's something people are already used to in the customisation stakes) but at the same time do I really need to put in my favourites again? Is there no way to read what I already have during the first run of Handy Shell and populate this with my own picks?



The next line is probably my favourite - the phone settings. This is a quick glance/quick change on a number of features on your phone, mostly around communication. A single tap on the Bluetooth icon will toggle your Bluetooth on or off (or you can change this to launch the Bluetooth application if you so wish), and alongside this you have icons and numerical cues for your missed calls and unread SMS and emails, finally finishing on quick change icons to alter your chosen ringtone profile or overall phone theme.

All these strips (and those in the other views as well) have their own customisable settings, you just pop into the Settings dialog, choose the view, and then choose the part of the view to alter. I get the feeling that this modular approach runs through the entire program, so it would be an easy matter to add a view of another application to any screen. In fact, Epocware have done exactly that in building a view of Handy Weather into Handy Shell's desktop and bundling a one year subscription to Handy Weather in the registration price of Handy Shell.

It's important to realise that each element in Handy Shell might seem a bit 'is that it?' when taken on its own, but it's the glueing of them altogether into a single package and making them all relatively easy to access that makes Handy Shell so useful. Think of it like a multi-bladed Swiss Army knife - nobody carries just a pair of tweezers with them, but with that knife you'll always have one when you need it - just like some of the icons in Handy Shell.

Tapping on the right soft key lets you cycle through the three views of Handy Shell, and after the Today screen is the Applications view, a 3x4 grid of applications that you can set up and shuffle around. It's no surprise that this feels a lot like the regular S60 application launcher, and with some careful thought, you could probably get 95% of your regular smartphone usage launching from this screen. The one feature that's missing here is using the keypad to fast launch an icon. As the keypad is also 3x4, matching the matrix on the S60 home screen, pressing a number on the standard S60 applications menu launches the one whose icon is in the same relative place on the screen. Handy Shell is missing this and I found my thumb erroneously hitting the keypad to launch something on numerous occasions.

Asking for folder support in this screen would be a step too far, even though I like the idea of ditching the S60 app launcher completely - the point here is to have your most used applications shortcutted, not all your applications. Still, it is Handy Shell, not Handy Shell Around The Popular Bits. You've got full control over what applications to add, and you can edit them or move them around as often as you wish.



I did like the dialog screen to choose the applications - rather than the radio button screen that S60 uses, where you have to scroll (a lot), you can just start typing the name of the application and Handy Shell will search as you start to type.

The contacts view works in pretty much the same way as the applications view - 12 slots to put in your favourite contacts for dialling. If they have a thumbnail graphic that is used, alternatively a nice font is used to get as much of their name in as possible. One thing missing here (perhaps a bug, or earmarked for the next release?) is some intelligent context awareness. If I'm on a contact and select 'New... [SMS] Message' from the menu is it wrong to expect Handy Shell to pre-populate the message editor with the correct phone number? What's weird is that if you select 'Create Message' on the top level menu, it does pre-populate the editor. Curiouser and curiouser.

Alongside the views is one of my favourite features of Handy Shell - the quick dialler. From the standby screen of a vanilla S60 phone, hitting the keypad simply racks up some numbers to dial. Not with this application though. It starts searching the contents of your smartphone to try and work out what you are typing. It will scan phone numbers to match the numbers you start to enter; or take the T9 spellings to a match up a name you are typing from your address book; or use that same T9 spelling in your list of applications. Looking to start the podcasting app? Just start typing P-O-D... and the app will be listed. As will the number for 'Podium Computing' from your contacts, or any number starting 663. It's quick, simple, easy to understand, and I love it. This is an application in its own right, and if I were to lose Handy Shell, I suspect this is the part I would miss the most. [NB. this functionality is also available in some other add-on utilities, most notably SkyeQuiKey - Ed]

It's also the reason why I can't 'speed dial' an application to launch, as pressing number keys starts the quick dial part of the program - it's a tough call, but I think I prefer this quick dialling once the muscle memory forgets about pressing number keys.



Handy Shell also replaces the 'task bar', normally accessed by holding down the Applications key on your smartphone, with a full screen system overview. Here, as well as seeing (and being able to jump to) the running applications in a full screen view, you'll also get the time and date (so now it's only ever one keypress away) and details on your free RAM, storage and memory card space.... something that the true hacker [Ewan looks sideways at Steve] is always looking at on his phone, but seems to be less and less critical as smartphone specs improve.

For all the complexity that Handy Shell offers, there will still be times where you need to duck into the regular S60 interface, and thankfully Handy Shell is not a jealous program. You tap the Applications key to get into Handy Shell, but while in the shell if you tap it again you will be taken to the regular S60 standby/Applications screens. How this works can be subtly changed via the settings.

There is a touch of jealousy, though, because I really can't see a way to switch Handy Shell off. Once it's installed and running, it's just there. Yes you can toggle everything off, but the Task Manager is always there, and it's going to pop up when you hit certain keys (depending on those settings). The only 100% sure way to do this is to take off and nuke it from orbit remove the application from your handset altogether. But that makes sense. If you have Handy Shell, it's because you want to be using it, not switching it on once in a while for kicks. It's either on or off. (Luckily a regular uninstall of Handy Shell will shut it down correctly and let you remove it cleanly, should this be needed)

And to be honest, there's no reason for it not to be on. While it does add significantly to the productivity potential of your smartphone, it's not unduly complicated in what it does or how it does it. By spreading the main functions over three screens which you can easily switch between, all the information has been given room to breathe, and it actually makes your smartphone easier to use. Sure, the set-up takes time, and getting your head round a new way of working takes a bit of time, but if Handy Shell was to appear on a bog standard any-OS smartphone and be the core method of running things, I think it would be up to the job. Part of me is really looking forward to a touch-enabled version of this on the 5800 at some point next year [hear that Rafe, I'm reviewing that combination... now get me a 5800 - Ewan].




For all the faults I've mentioned here, Handy Shell has a fearsomely large job to do as a full replacement for S60's core UI feature, and it's only when you sit back do you spot the little touches, such as the smoothness when you switch between portrait and landscape modes, the display showing the time of your next alarm call (and not just a little bell), the preview of unread SMS messages as you scroll your cursor over the icon, the 'new' menu option giving you access to your Contacts, Calendar, To-do list and said alarm clock, having 'lock keypad' on the menu... There is a lot going on in here.

Handy Shell isn't just a great addition to S60, it pretty much rips out and replaces all the launching and thread management of S60 that users see. To a certain extent, that's reflected in the price of $45, which may raise some eyes. I think it's a perfectly fair price for something of this scope and breadth... and stability. I've been really working Handy Shell hard and not yet experienced a crash or system slowdown. With a full 14 day demo available for free before you need to register, anyone using their smartphone for more than just calls and messaging should seriously consider running this little gem.

Exclusive: Nokia N82 v31 firmware now online

Nokia Software Update now has firmware v31.0.016 available for the Nokia N82, weighing in at 118MB. The N82 has UDP, but best to back up anyway, just in case. I had a few issues, now resolved - the firmware is safe to upgrade to. See below...

In my case, after upgrading, I hit lots of hangs (all involving Nokia Maps), requiring battery-out-restarts, so I used *#7370# to wipe the internal disk back to 'factory' status and rebuilt everything, to no avail. Maps is still misbehaving, hanging after launching and answering the 'Go online' question. I'm not pleased.

[Later] Turns out there's a wierd bug in Nokia Maps, whereby if you don't have a working SIM AND non-Wi-Fi data connection the first time Nokia Maps starts, you'll get the hang and problems I describe. Putting in a valid SIM (I initially only had an old, zero-credit one in since I was trying to set everything up using Wi-Fi) and making sure 3G data was all working seems to have solved the problem. Phew.

Mobitubia is behaving erratically, this may relate to something broken under the hood or it may be that YouTube have changed their formats again. Will report back on this.

Watch this space for a changelog. Mainly bug fixes, I suspect. Note that v30 firmware was already protected against SDK 'hack' tampering, so v31 here is for other reasons.

So Nokia is world's biggest computer maker in 2008

So yes, its time for yet another instance of mobile phones taking surprising victories in the digital convergence battle. I reported the general trend in my previous posting, and the conclusion that when only considering "smartphones" - even by that tight measure of these new "pocket computers" - the numbers have tilted this year, and now for 2008 the world's biggest computer maker is no longer Hewlett-Packard or Dell, it is Nokia.

Today I dug up the various numbers as best as I could (using Gartner, Analsys, IDC, Apple). I included all PC sales, all smartphone sales, all stand-alone PDA sales, and estimated also mainframe and mini computer sales into the total, and arrived at a total computer sales figure for the last four quarters (from October 2007 to September 2008) of 465 million. Note that PCs account for 300 million of those, so when we add the smartphones we are going about 50% bigger in the overall picture. But I think it is a fair measure to include smartphones (see below).

So here is the breakdown according to my analysis of the biggest computer makers in the world in 2008:

Nokia 64.1 Million units 13.8% market share
HP 55.2 Million units 11.9% market share
Dell 43.8 Million units 9.4% market share
Apple 35.0 Million units 7.5% market share
Acer 30.8 Million units 6.6% market share
Lenovo 22.1 Million units 4.7% market share
RIM 19.8 Million units 4.2% market share
Toshiba 12.9 Million units 2.8% market share
Others 181.9 Million units 39.1% market share

Total 465.5 Million units 100.0%

THEN I NEED TO MAKE A COUPLE OF NOTES

First note on Apple. I also was very generous with Apple, I not only added their official numbers for Macintosh PC and notebook sales, and iPhone sales, but also the iPod Touch is another equivalent "pocket computer" and could be considered a PDA just as easily as a media player. Because it includes the ability to download applications and otherwise is a valid computer, only very small, I am including it.

But Apple does not release iPod breakdowns in sales, and no analyst is supplying them either. So I made a very rough estimate - and simply because there are four models of iPods available (Touch, Classic, Nano and Shuffle) - I attributed one quarter of all iPod sales to the Touch. I am pretty sure that is way too much, considering that the Touch is at the top end of the price range and costs nearly five times as much as the cheapest Shuffle - but with these numbers Apple would be fourth biggest computer maker. It is relatively close to Acer, so if my math is badly of, then Apple may fall down one peg. The distance to Dell is too much that its extremely unlikely that Apple would be the third biggest.

Second, a note on Nokia

Nokia numbers are only the smartphone sales as reported by Gartner and Analys. So the mainstream Nokia phones, from low cost phones to featurephones, are excluded. The above count is only for smartphones. Also I have not included the Nokia non-phone devices (their media players and internet tablets) even though these could also be included, because I don't find those numbers reported. With them the Nokia number would be marginally bigger still.

Third on the full 2008 year numbers

Note that my analysis can only include reported numbers so obviously I cannot report on the current quarter until those numbers are formally released. But I believe the actual numbers will be very similar to these, because of the overall economic downturn. So it is very likely that the actual fourth quarter 2008 numbers are not as much above their 2007 numbers, as the earlier part of the year has been. With companies the need to slash budgets has been severe, so its likely that corporate purchases of PCs is particularly hard-hit this fourth quarter. With residential purchases, the laptop or PC is quite an expensive gift, so my gut says, that types of gifts are going to suffer more in Christmas sales than smaller gifts. And this is likely also to affect smartphones. So at least the percentages will be very similar after the fourth quarter 2008 numbers are released, the aggregate number may end up a couple of percentage points higher (or not) for this year. None of the companies will move significantly on their rankings based on fourth quarter performance and Nokia's lead is now insurmountable for this year.

FINALLY, WHY IS A SMARTPHONE A COMPUTER

Some might argue that every mobile phone is a computer (as its guts are of course managed by microprocessor) and that can be justified. Almost all modern (non-smartphone) mobile phones do have a browser and far more than half of new phones this year have Java and can accept downloads of content and things such as games. Those who use this defintion will probably know that Nokia became the world's biggest computing device manufacturer back in the early parts of this decade, selling more phones (ie "computing devices") than all PC makers put together. But by this definition should we also consider the Playstation a computer and our home DVR/PVR (hard disk drive recorder for our TV, like TiVo or Sky+). We could then add our microwave and coffee maker while we're at it..

I think basic mobile phones should not be considered computers. But smartphones - that is a totally different matter. In my long posting for the holidays, I celebrated 50 years of computers in Finland and in it I also made comparisons of the performance of computers and that of smartphones. A modern smartphone has all the elements traditionally considered key parts of a true computer. It has a CPU, memory, storage, an input and output system. A smartphone has a standard operating system which allows users to download and install applications (software). Not just content, but actual applications.

The dictionary definition of a computer says the device can be programmed, and the common usage today means it can accept applications to be installed by the user (this was not the common usage in the 1970s, in the era of the mainframe when the PC emerged; at that time common usage was a programming language compiler and all programs were coded in something like Fortran or Cobol or Pascal etc. None of us normal users bother to use a programming language today on our PC). The definition says can be programmed and a normal phone does not accept user-installed applications, but every smartphone - by definition - does. It fits the definition just as well as a supercomputer.

And if you're thinking "but the phone is a toy, its not a "proper" computer, then do recognize that the top end smartphone of today (like my Nokia E90 Communicator or N82) has the specifications that match essentially all critical components of a supercomputer from only some 20 years ago, the Cray 2. For example the processing speed of these top smartphones runs roughly in the 1,000 MIPS range (millions of instructions per second). That was the speed of the Cray 2. Its earlier sibling, the Cray 1, had a speed of 150 MIPS. A top end Nokia managed that speed three years ago.

Note I am not arguing that we have a "real supercomputer" in our pocket. But I am arguing, that the smartphone fits all the definitions of a computer by what it is, and what it can do. And by its performance, it will match the performance of the most powerful computer on the planet from two decades ago. Or more close to everyday people, will match the performance of an entry-level laptop only five years ago.

There are smartphones that use the Windows operating system (modified for mobile phones) and the Apple iPhone uses a variant of the Macintosh OS/X operating system. There are smartphones that use Linux the third of the main computer operating systems. I think it is perfectly valid to consider smartphones as computers today. They may be small, but they are computers in every way. To discriminate against them, to me is as dumb, as if someone in the 1980s had said that we should not count the personal computer as a "real computer" and only mainframe computers should be included in statistics of computers.

HOW IS IT USED?

So then you might say, ok, it has the performance of an old computer, maybe, but its use is as a phone, so it should be considered a phone, not a computer. I think this is a tricky angle. What if you have an old desktop computer that sits at home, connected to the broadband, but you have your newer laptop on which you do all of your regular computer activities. And you have reconfigured your desktop with Skype to be your phone, and you only use it as a phone. Did the computer stop being a computer now because its primary use is as a phone? No, it is still a computer.

But consider this. The most common use, the so-called killer application for a PC today is internet access. Do we use a smartphone for internet access? Yes we do. Look at an iPhone, massive internet access, both over 3G and on WiFi. The smartphone is USED like a computer is used. For many iPhone users, the internet access is the most desired feature, far more important than voice calls, so it is, for those users, primarily a wireless internet access device. Totally replicates computer use, and there is even the study earlier this year that about half of iPhone users are migrating computer use away from their laptops and onto their iPhones. Its no fantasy of mine. An iPhone is for many of its owners, a partial (or even complete) replacement of a computer. If it replaces a computer, and it fits the computer's definition perfectly, should it not be called a computer then?

And take a common application used on personal computers today, email. Now a smartphone, Blackberry. Across most of its users, the Blackberry is the preferred and primary email device. The first evidence of email usage shifting away from laptops to Blackberries was reported back in 2001 and has been consistenty reported this whole decade. Another computer use, that is clearly perfectly capable of being done on a smartphone. Its not just that it is capable of performing like a "real computer", a smartphone is so good at it, that many people are shifting their computing use away from desktops and laptops to smartphones like the iPhone and the Blackberry.

And I haven't even started on the Developing World, where mobile phone based internet access outnumbes PC based internet access by as much as 10 to 1. Where a smartphone is often the only way to have any computing ability at all, within a reasonable budget - and where landline based broadband is non-existent, or intermittent, and often frightfully expensive. Talk to users in the Philippines or India or Kenya or South Africa, that can a smarphone be a computer, and they'll mostly say, that it not only can be, it is.

WILL NOT STOP USE ON BIGGER COMPUTERS

And please don't misunderstand me. I'm not singing alarms of the "end of the PC". Just like the fact that mobile emerged as a new mass media channel, did not end the previous six media, just like the internet did not end the previous five or TV end the previous four mass media. They all just adjusted for the newest form. The same is true of smartphones and bigger computers. We will not stop using laptops and big government etc uses will not stop with mainframes and supercomputers.

What the smartphone now allows, is for some computer use to migrate to it. It really does make sense, that heavy email users love their Blackberries. It is better for many uses of basic email, than a PC. The same will happen with many other uses, like the iPhone which is a particularly well used camera to upload pictures to Flickr, ahead of many major digital camera brands with their SLR versions; and ahead of all other cameraphones. Its particularly good at both easy capture of pictures - and easy uploading (to Flickr in this case). With a digital camera, we usually have to go the extra step of moving the pictures to our PC, and from there upload to Flickr. But it can be done direct from a smartphone, and apparently iPhone users are very prone to doing so.

This kind of usage will be seen on smartphones. Probably lots of videos, so YouTube watching (and uploading videos from smartphones, in particular those with DVD quality videocameras like my N82) will be very suited for smartphone use. But note, its not a particularly pleasant environment for editing pictures (no mouse for example, and in editing pictures you can never have too large a screen ha-ha). So for editing our images, if we have one, we will prefer to do that on a PC.

So please don't misunderstand me, even though some users of the Blackberry or iPhone are shifting behaviour away from the PC, that is not going to shift the majority of PC users to smartphones. It took laptops 23 years to replace desktops as the most sold form of PC this year, and even so, the installed base is predominantly desktops still in 2008, and will continue to be for a few more years. The PC has at least a decade, proably two, before the smartphone could hope to reach it in size of the installed base.

AM NOT ALONE

Also this is not something only "Silly Tomi" would think of. Nokia has been calling its N-Series not mobile phones, but since 2005 already - for three years - they've called them "multimedia computers." Apple calls its iPhone their variant of the netbook. And that is also what the Economist concluded in its big celebration of the Personal Computer anniversary issue. So this is becoming an accepted view, that smartphones are indeed small, pocketable palmtop sized computers. But real computers, yes.

It is a question of size only. The smartphone is the most personal of computers, it fits in our pocket, we carry it everywhere. It should be counted in the total numbers of computers. And with that change to how computers are counted, yes, this year for the first time, Nokia becomes the biggest maker of computers in the world, Apple jumps to fourth place, and RIM hits the seventh biggest maker slot, ahead of Toshiba who invented the laptop. You can quote me on that..

MORE INFO

If you new to the mobile space and want to understand the scale of the mobile telecoms industry (of which the smartphone is a major growth element), I have released my widely referenced annual review of the industry size. It was also given the (tied for) best blog recognition by the last Carnival of the Mobilists for the year.

If you're already headed into the smartphone space, in a post-iPhone era, and need to understand how to build compelling services for mobile, I have a good primer for you, including the seven unique competitive advantages of mobile in the article on the 7th mass media channel.

And if you are dubious of this claim, or unsure how to feel about smartphones - should they, or should they not be considered computers, for that I wrote an update to this story, examining five eras in computers with a good comparative table, which may help you understand what the trends are, and how consistent (or inconsistent) the smartphone is in those trends.

From: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/12/so-nokia-is-wor.html

The N95 : After a year with my Dad

About a year ago I gave my Dad a Nokia N95 for Christmas. At that time, I thought it was the best phone out there, and only the best would do for my old man.

What I forgot, however, was that my Dad is REALLY tough on his gadgets. He crams them into his pockets full of keys or coins, he tosses them around. After remembering that vital fact, I was worried about how the N95-1 would manage under such "tough" conditions.

So I present to ye, pictures of the N95 after it survived a year with its toughest user, that I know.



The first thing you've probably noticed already, is that the weak battery compartment is taped on to the thing. This usually wont be a problem, unless you change SIMs alot like my Dad and have to open the battery compartment a lot. The plastic hinges at the ends were really brittle and broke off early on.

Next !



The camera still works fine. The lens protector has worn quite a bit. A lot of the silver paint has come off, and there's dust in the lens opener slide mechanism.



But the good thing is, the lens protector did its job well. The lens was still fine, but had a little dust in it though. Still fared a lot better than if it didnt have a lens protector.



When it comes to keys, the chrome on the side zoom in/out (aka volume increase/decrease) buttons have completely worm off.



Oh dear.

The chrome under the pencil button and "C" key have now also worn away.




The slider's also become a little harder to move up or down. A lot of dust has accumulated in the sides of the slider mechanism.

Apart from that, the phone still works fine ! The flash works, the camera works. The firmware hasnt been updated, and my Dad has no intent to update it (mostly cause he doesnt even know how to begin with that operation). Mechanically or software wise, nothing has gone wrong with the device at all so far.



Clearly a testiment to the N95's product quality. Heh, maybe Nokia should hire my Dad for its product quality testing.

From: http://zomgitscj.blogspot.com/2008/12/n95-after-year-with-my-dad.html

Graphic Acceleration on Mobile Phone

Having heard many a user refer to 'upgrading' from (for example) a Nokia N95 8GB to an N85, I thought it worth examining an important way in which all is not necessarily positive when going from an older phone to a newer one.

Yes, the N85 has USB charging, the N79 has theme-switching backplates, the N96 has a DVB-H receiver built-in, and so on. But none of these, and, as far as I know, neither do the even newer 5800 XpressMusic and N97, have the same oomph under the bonnet as the 'classic' generation of S60 3rd Edition devices: the Nokia N93, N93i, N82, N95, N95 8GB and E90. All of these had dedicated graphics acceleration, thanks to the Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 chip used in their design.

Graphics acceleration is where a piece of software (e.g. a game) calls a standard OpenGL routine (to calculate and draw a particular 3D vector, for example) and, rather than the main phone processor having to do all the sums long-hand, the built-in graphics hardware, built from the ground up for this sort of job, leaps into action and does the work in a fraction of the time.

The end result, for the user, is that many games (e.g. Oval Racer, FIFA 07, Quake, Global race, Crash Bandicoot, Panda Manda, Knights of the Dark Age, to name a few) run smoother and faster, videos play back with no glitches (handling a wider range of resolutions and bitrates without stuttering) and graphics-heavy applications run without problems (e.g. Mobitubia, the YouTube client can play back videos smoothly at the same time as downloading them as fast as possible).

It might help to put the scale of the difference into some sort of numerical perspective. Running SPMark, a standard benchmarking tool, on the Nokia N82 (as representative of the 'classic' line, e.g. N95), the N78 (as representative of the latest non-accelerated S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones) and the N96 (different in its own way since it has a STMicroelectronics chip that's dedicated to audio and video playback), we discover the following scores:

The helicopter demo simulates a commercial game pretty well. Run Oval Racer, for example, on your chosen S60 handset, and you'll see very similar frame rates to the SPMark test. On the N82, N95, etc, the game's gloriously smooth, with textured graphics right, left and centre. On the N78, N79 and N96, etc, it's sluggish and much, much less fun.

Why has Nokia changed the chipset they're using for their top end smartphones in such a detrimental way? With games and multimedia being hotter than ever in the handheld and phone world, surely more graphics power and not less would have been the way to go? The N95 has almost TEN TIMES more graphics power than its successor, the N96.

So far, RealPlayer has been tweaked enough that many users many not notice that their phone is underpowered, and N-Gage games have been written specifically to not depend on the presence of hardware OpenGL acceleration, i.e. they have been written to the lowest common denominator. So few people have noticed that the Emperor's not wearing any clothes.

Nokia will of course say that the internals of their phones were changed because of cost issues, it's all about building to a price and a specific market segment. But I have a feeling that, in the face of competition from the graphics-accelerated Apple iPhone, this chipset downgrade decision will come home to bite Nokia where it hurts most.

Is it too late to stop the rot? I hope not. I really, really hope that Nokia are even now preparing a flagship or two with just as much power as the Nokia N93 of over two and a half years ago and the N95 of 20 months ago. Care to comment on all this, Nokia? Is it too late to solder in a graphics chip into your 2009 flagship, the N97?

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 15 Dec 2008

PS. Incidentally, the latest Samsung S60 phones, the i8510 and i7110 also have an OMAP chipset, the 2430 (I won't bore you with the differences between the 2420 and 2430). Let's try the i7110 at the SPMark test:

So, performance that's not quite as good as that in the 'classic' Nokia S60 phones, but within striking distance. For one thing, the OMAP 2430 isn't quite as capable as the 2420, and we also perhaps have to factor in that the i7110 and all Samsung's other S60 phones are on early firmware - there may yet be optimisations to come... But still a heck of a lot better than any of Nokia's hardware from 2008/2009.

Nokia: Running in molasses

Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time.

That thought came to me several times during a briefing day that Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation held recently in San Francisco. A recurring theme was a deeply earnest discussion of how big and complex their business is, and how proud they are that despite the complexity they can make forward progress. For example:

Charles Davies, CTO of the new foundation, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages," all of which have been charted out in a diagram that will be posted soon on the foundation's website. Davies was proud that the diagram is in SVG format, so you can zoom in on it and see that "this is an architecture that's not just a plateful of spaghetti."

The diagram looks a bit like a plateful of very colorful spaghetti (although in fairness to Charles, that's true of every OS architecture diagram I've ever seen). Anyway, the big takeaway was how huge the OS is.

Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.

Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.

Lee Williams, Nokia's software platform SVP who is moving over to become head of the Symbian foundation, picked up on the theme of massiveness. He said the OS is on 200 million devices, with 200 device types shipped and another 100 in development. With support for five different baseband modems, seven different processor architectures, symmetric multiprocessing, and a broad set of displays, "your options are dramatic and huge."

This sort of infrastructure is needed, he said, because IT, telecom, and the Internet "have merged almost completely.... It's the perfect storm of convergence. There's almost nothing it can't eat or it won't use." He compared its importance to the creation of movable type, color palettes, and the Renaissance.

He noted that some people think the Symbian Foundation is a response to Android and other competitive moves, but said the company can't move that fast, and actually the change was in the works long before Google announced its software.

At dinner, I had a chance to chat with one of the Nokia managers. He was kind enough to let me play around with a pre-release N97 (more on that below), and the discussion gravitated to the iPhone. He told me how excited he is by the many new products Nokia has in the labs but can't talk about yet, and expressed some frustration that people don't understand why it takes time for Nokia to respond to changes in the market. He described Nokia as a giant ship. "It takes a long time to turn it, but when we do..." he said ominously, and then reminded me that Netscape once had a lead over Microsoft before it was crushed.

The problem with talking to the folks from Nokia is that you're never sure what they believe vs. what's the official story they're trying to put out in the market. They're disciplined enough that they can stay on message quite well, and in most conversations they focus on talking about what they're doing rather than asking for feedback or getting into a two-way conversation.

So I'll assume that Nokia was being serious. In that case, let's look at some financials from 1997 (Netscape vs. Microsoft) and 2007 (Apple vs. Nokia):

Don't worry too much about revenue and net income; those are usually tied up by the ongoing operations of each company. The line I want you to focus on is cash. That is your ammunition -- the extra resource available to fund a big marketing campaign, or a new product development program, or an acquisition of an innovative new technology. Microsoft had 46 times more cash than Netscape in 1997, and it wasn't seriously threatened in any of its other core businesses. It could, and did, spend Netscape into the ground.

Apple has about the same cash hoard as Nokia. Much more importantly, Apple can focus that cash on a narrower battlefront. Its situation relative to Windows is relatively safe. Although Microsoft can never be ignored, it is innovating so slowly that Apple can take some profit from its PC business to fund other things. The music player business is also stable; although it's not growing like it used to, no one has come close to matching the integration of the iPod and iTunes. So Apple is free to spend huge wads of cash to establish its new iPhone business. It can pick the countries and vertical usages it wants to dominate, and as long as it doesn't do too many things at once, it can outspend almost any competitor.

Nokia, on the other hand, has battlefields everywhere:
--In mobile phones it's fighting Samsung, LG, and SonyEricsson, and a badly wounded (therefore desperate) Motorola.
--In entertainment smartphones it's fighting Apple.
--In communicators it's fighting RIM.
--In OS it's fighting Google, Microsoft, etc.
--In online services it's fighting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.

Source: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/12/nokia-running-in-molasses.html